Tag Archives: vR Automation

We announced an extension pack to manage OpenStack Havana endpoints with vRealize Automation v6.2. Without it you can only manage Grizzly releases. What is good about this is that we now need to only update a plugin to manage a new OpenStack release, not update vR A itself. From the announcement:

The vRealize Automation OpenStack extension package enables vRealize Automation 6.2 to manage an open source OpenStack cloud computing software platform. This extension package is written to support OpenStack Grizzly and Havana release versions via consumption of OpenStack REST API (v2 and v1). Following is the list of capabilities of OpenStack extension package:

Right on cue as promised we announced a lot of important new versions in the vRealize Suite for cloud operations. I will list here a reference to all documentation and download sites. cloud automation in a separate update.

We are pleased to announce the General Availability of vRealize Configuration Manager (VCM) 5.7.3, a key part of the VMware vRealize Operations Management Suite that automates configuration management across virtual, physical and cloud environments.

Organizations can use VCM to continuously audit the configurations of VMware infrastructure (including VMware ESX®, ESXi™, vCenter, vCloud® Director™ and vCloud® Networking and Security) as well as Windows, Linux and UNIX operating systems. Configuration compliance can be maintained against internal standards, security best practices, vendor hardening guidelines, and even regulatory mandates.

This release delivers critical enhancements requested by our customers, field and PSO teams to improve vSphere support, speed time to value, and extend capabilities for OS configuration management.

Highlights of this release include:

Updated Platform Support for the VCM Collector

Installation of the Collector and SQL Server components on Windows Server 2012 and 2012R2 is now supported

Existing installations of VCM can be upgraded or migrated to Windows Server 2012 or 2012R2 as part of the installation process for 5.7.3

Added Support for New Versions of Client Platforms

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

CentOS 7

Oracle Enterprise Linux 7

vSphere 6 Ready

VCM 5.7.3 will support vSphere 6 upon its release

Support for older versions of vSphere is unchanged in VCM 5.7.3 (vSphere 4.0U1 and later)

You may have noticed that since VMworld we use some new product names for our management products. Since I have renamed the tags on my blog here accordingly, I wanted to give you a little table of transition here. What’s in a name you might say, well actually quite a lot since we rationalised things and put some more logic in. Things I explain in my presentations is that the new vRealize Operations has no obligatory link to VMware vCenter anymore, so it would be silly to still call it vCenter Operations Manager…

old name

new name on premise

new name SaaS version

vCloud Hybrid Service

vCloud Air

vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops)

vRealize Operations (vR Ops)

vRealize Air Operations

vCloud Automation Center (vCAC)

vRealize Automation (vR A)

vRealize Air Automation

ITBM

vRealize Business

Please also note that our public cloud service changed names to vCloud Air. And … you see of course that we have SaaS versions in the pipeline. These will live in vCloud Air but can also be used to manage your private cloud. A first tool not in the table is in beta, namely vCloud Air Compliance, a tool to perform the compliance part of vCenter Configuration Manager without local installation !

There is also a vRealize suite which contains Operations, Automation and Business. The difference with vCloud Suite is that vRealize is positioned for hybrid environments with multiple hypervisors and external cloud services. It is licensed per OSI (operating system instance). More info here.

If you are concerned with security and are looking for hardening guidelines for vRealize Automation Center software, a new paper is published here.

The guidelines we developed with the new 6.2 release available now. Engineering has not tested with these recommendations with 6.0 or 6.1, but the architecture has not changed significantly and these recommendations will likely work with older 6.x releases.

In January the VMware BeLux SE team organizes again free technical enablement sessions in Zaventem and Luxemburg, see details below. I will deliver the cloud operations and cloud automation day with Stef Verbist and the Openstack, containers,… afternoon with Filip Verloy.

Winter School 2015 is all about the Software-Defined-Enterprise, VMware’s foundation for helping customers transform their traditional IT environments into a broker of services in order to aligned with business demands.

On this first day, we will give you an introduction into all the different VMware’s building blocks that make up the Software Defined Enterprise.

Belgium:
Monday January 12 PM

Luxembourg:
Monday January 19 PM

High-level general session: SDE (VSAN, NSX, EUC)

Winter School 2015 is all about the Software-Defined-Enterprise, VMware’s foundation for helping customers transform their traditional IT environments into a broker of services in order to aligned with business demands.

On this first day, we will give you an introduction into all the different VMware’s building blocks that make up the Software Defined Enterprise.

Belgium:

Tuesday January 13 AM

Luxembourg:

Tuesday January 20 AM

Hyper Converged Infrastructure – VSAN2.0/EVO:RAIL/RACK

During this session we will review the choices we give our customers to build their Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). We will look into technical detail to the different technologies used.

IT organizations are continuously challenged with protecting business-critical applications and data against various causes of downtime. VMware delivers a comprehensive, integrated portfolio of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that provides high availability, data protection and disaster recovery. During this session we will go more in depth into those solutions.

Operations disciplines are converging. Performance, capacity and configuration become inseparable as the SDDC is extended with public cloud services. IT departments require integrated, analytics-based operations management to ensure service quality and increase operational efficiency on or off-site.

Automation plays a critical role in managing the SDDC where compute, network and storage resources are virtualized and controlled by software. It improves speed and control of both service delivery and ongoing management functions. Automation is also a central point of control for service delivery that combines on-site and public cloud resources.

Belgium:

Thursday January 15 AM

Luxembourg:

Thursday January 22 AM

Network virtualization

VMware NSX is the network virtualization and security platform for the SDDC. In this session we will provide a deep dive into the capabilities of the platform and go into the new features of the latest release. We will also cover how the integrate the platform into an existing network and best practices.

Hopefully you know about our visual orchestration engine that is shipped with vCenter and plays a crucial role in vR Automation Center. for more info visit the excellent VCO team site. A new release is just out:

vCenter Orchestrator 5.1.3

GA Date:4 December 2014

What’s new?

This release of vCenter Orchestrator introduces a number of improvements and bug fixes.

Summer is coming again, things are slowing down (well they used to in summer…) but we are hard at work to bring you our famous summer schools again in the Netherlands and BeLux. During these free technical seminars VMware SEs bring you the latest on a certain subject and you can take Hands-On Labs locally to train yourself. More info and registration: Netherlands and BeLux.

Willem van Engeland and I will run the cloud automation schools in the Netherlands and I will run vCAC in BeLux. Hope to see you there !

My colleagues from Tech Marketing have done a tremendous, labour-intensive job and created a series of short video’s covering every aspect of vCloud Automation Center 6. We used these ourselves as prerequisite to an internal bootcamp.

The good news is that they are also avalaible for free on Youtube, so you can watch them absolutely anywhere. Most are only 8-10 minutes in length, so perfect for your commute (on public transport, not your car obviously).

Even better all these instructional videos are available in our Mobile Knowledge Portal on your iOS or Android device. What ?! You do not have this great utility yet ?? You never want to look up info in white papers or presentations, view videos and so on ? Please repent your sins and download now on appstore (this is the iPad version). More info and Android links on the portal.

There is also a Partner University Mobile app that VMware partners can use to take training anywhere, more info and download links here.

I think these utilities are not used enough, I think I will blog separately about them.

Yesterday an update to vCAC was published that solves some important issues in v6.0. If you are currently testing or deploying vCAC 6, this version 6.01 is highly recommended. Access details and readme file here.

There are some upcoming beta training classes for the new vCAC 6, the nearest ones in Frimley (UK) and Munich (D). These classes are 5 days and are offered with a 50% rebate. Highly recommended ! More info.